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by DeltaCoast 1110 days ago
I worked at Codecademy - you're right the getting stuck part hurts people moving forward, we spent a lot of time trying to help people without outright spitting it out - it was less about runtime errors and more about the concept. I'm not sure that an AI spitting out an answer is the right solution to help people learn - we also thought about different forms (projects, embeds in articles, tutors, etc)

Another Codecademy alumn is building a different learn to code platform - he wrote many courses and was always interested in teaching and providing resources.

https://www.codedex.io/

All in all, they problems were learning and education problems rather than technical.

2 comments

Thanks Deltacoast, that's an interesting insight. I agree that being given the answer is the wrong approach, and the AI needs to be fine-tuned to not do that, similar to KhanAcademy's Khanmigo bot.

I do think having a knowledgeable assistant can be helpful though. I've watched some users literally get unstuck with the AI, and it's amazing.

Great work on Codecademy by the way, I'm (obviously) a big fan.

The site doesn't work for me in Safari. Tried 01. Setting Up and clicking run doesn't do anything but shake the Terminal box. Even if I put in garbage it does nothing.